Category: Ubuntu

Added: 30th of October 2020

Viewed: 1,954 times

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➔ Create a simple cronjob in Linux

Shutdown Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distributions at a specific time or within (x) minutes

I never realised the shutdown command extended further, where you can specify a time to shutdown or shutdown the system in (x) amount of minutes.

To shutdown your system at a specific time, it must be entered the following format HH:MM

So to shutdown your system at Two Twenty PM in the afternoon we enter the following command

sudo shutdown 14:20


To shutdown your system after (x) amount of minutes, it must be entered in the following format +m

So to shutdown the system after 20 Minutes enter the following command
sudo shutdown +20


You can also add a message when the shutdown command is initiated, for example shutting down
sudo shutdown +20 "Shutting Down....."


To reboot your system at Ten PM in the evening we enter the following command
sudo shutdown -r 22:00 "Rebooting..."


You could create a cron job to reboot your system once a month, once a week, once a day and so on. Cron jobs are discussed in my other tutorial, which can be found here

To cancel a scheduled shutdown or reboot of your system, you can use the following command
sudo shutdown -c